LADEE lives! For now, anyway ...

By Tamara Dietrich

LADEE lunar orbiter survives lunar eclipse

NASA

NASA

NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) launched from Virginia's Wallops Island last September on a mission to study the moon’s ultra-thin atmosphere, but it was always meant as a 100-day journey.

The solar-powered science lab was supposed to gather its primary data by March, then spin down, down, down to its inevitable demise by now, crashing onto the lunar surface.

But NASA says LADEE survived a close call on April 5, then an even closer one during the total lunar eclipse on the 15th, which it really shouldn’t have. Normally, the satellite loses sunlight for only an hour a day, but the eclipse robbed it of its power source for about four.

“We watched telemetry as the spacecraft lost sunlight and began to cool down,” NASA says. “The battery discharged as the heaters kicked in, and we started receiving yellow and red alarms from the spacecraft as the power dropped and everything got colder.”

It looked like a fitting end for little LADEE … until …

“Once the eclipse ended, and the spacecraft started charging up again, the alarms gradually cleared and everything returned to normal,” NASA said.

As the orbiter concludes its orbit, it continues to gather high-value data, so NASA is pleased with the little LADEE that could.

But the orbiter is in its final passes, NASA said, and is flying so low over the lunar surface that it could impact on the dark side of the moon any minute now.